You really ought to read both President Obama’s speech and Dick Cheney’s speech from yesterday on national security. I always advise reading speeches because it you can cut through all the meaningless fawning bull-crap like, “oh – what great oratory skills presenter X has…,” and get down to the content presented. In my view – once speech consisted of high sounding theoretics – while the other seemed practical and realistic – but that’s just me. You can read them and draw your own conclusions.

Here is some audio of Mark Steyn and Hugh Hewitt discussing some of the aspects of Obama’s speech:

HH: Watched the extensive news coverage of President Obama and Dick Cheney hurling thunderbolts at each other. And to discuss that and other matters, joined by Columnist To the World, Mark Steyn. You can read all of Mark’s work at www.steynonline.com. Mark, just generally, quite an extraordinary day on the national security front with these battling giants of the national security world.

MS: Yes. I thought the President’s speech was revolting and contemptible, and one that he really should not have given. In a sense, the Vice President, Dick Cheney, all he had to do, really, was say well look, whatever you feel about these policies, for eight years, they worked, whereas during the 90s, we had attacks on American targets routinely throughout the 1990s, leading up to 9/11. Now obviously, there’s an element of luck in that as the IRA famously said to Mrs. Thatcher, you have to be lucky every day, we only have to be lucky once. But when you’ve been lucky for eight years, I think clearly you’re doing something right. And there was no need for Obama to give this speech, and he should not have given it.

HH: He’s clearly feeling very defensive. And Dick Cheney’s speech today was so sober, so detailed, so specific in its rebuttal of the airy claims about what’s going on in the world that I think it leaves a huge mark. But let’s listen to the worst two passages among many from the Obama speech, cut number 12A:

BHO: All too often, our government made decisions based on fear rather than foresight. But all too often our government trimmed facts and evidence to fit ideological predispositions. Instead of strategically applying our power and our principles, too often we set those principles aside as luxuries that we could no longer afford. And during this season of fear, too many of us, Democrats and Republicans, politicians, journalists and citizens, fell silent.

HH: Mark Steyn, this is a deeply dishonest statement. It lacks the specificity that would allow people to rebut it, and it is an attempt to give himself credit for that which he does not deserve, the national security success of the last eight years, and to diminish that success.

MS: Yes, I think that’s true. I mean, let me say first of all, I think it’s entirely improper for him to be giving this speech. It’s far more specific, if you look for example at Jimmy Carter’s famous speech, again, saying that, I think in 1977, saying we were all far too hung up about communism, and we had “an inordinate fear” of it, even that speech, as ridiculous as that was, was not a specific assault on the immediate preceding government. Well, what happened on January 20th was not some coup, was not the successful conclusion of a war of liberation. It’s a two party system, and Party A is out of power, and Party B is in power. But the acts taken in the last year, as far as the world were concerned, were the acts of the government of the United States. And given that they were generally successful for the citizens of the United States, I think this would have been a perfectly understandable speech to give last summer when he was campaigning for president. But it’s a very weird speech, and a contemptible speech to give right now.

HH: Let’s get to the second cut, this on interrogation, cut number 14:

BHO: I know some have argued that brutal methods like waterboarding were necessary to keep us safe. I could not disagree more. As commander in chief, I see the intelligence. I bear the responsibility for keeping this country safe. And I categorically reject the assertion that these are the most effective means of interrogation. What’s more, they undermine the rule of law. They alienate us in the world. They serve as a recruitment tool for terrorists, and increase the will of our enemies to fight us, while decreasing the will of others to work with America. They risk the lives of our troops by making it less likely that others will surrender to them in battle, and more likely that Americans will be mistreated if they are captured.

HH: Mark Steyn, there so many falsehoods in this. Go ahead.

MS: Yes, there are, and I think first of all, one thing that is completely absurd is this idea that somehow American interrogation techniques act as a recruitment tool for al Qaeda. This is nonsense. What acts as a recruitment tool for the jihad in general is when it’s seen or perceived to be successful, and the jihadists are seen as the coming men. The idea that some guy in Waziristan or Yemen is encouraged to join the jihad because of waterboarding is preposterous. There’s no evidence for it whatsoever. He’s just concocted that out of his own head, and I think actually betrays either the naïveté of this president, which is one thing, or what’s worse, is the cynicism of him if he knows that this is nonsense and he’s saying it anyway.

HH: Well, the idea that we’re undermining the rule of law as he undermines the rule of law, by making an attack upon the legal conclusions and positions of a previous administration, and adopting what is in essence an ex post facto approach to people who participated in the war on terror. It’s really something I never expected out of someone who purports to have been a scholar of the Constitution. Mark Steyn, the idea also that our methods will increase the degree of bad torture on our troops when they’re caught, it’s absurd. They cut our heads off.

MS: Yes, and I suppose he’s arguing here that well look, if we ease up on the waterboard, then when our troops are captured, they won’t use the rusty scimitar when they’re decapitating them. This is completely preposterous, the idea that somehow what is happening at Guantanamo and other facilities, if we make nice with these fellows, they will suddenly start observing the rules of the Geneva Convention. No, if you’re the kind of target they’re looking for, and they capture you, they will saw your head off and release it as a snuff video on the internet. And nothing that Obama says is going to change that. Now as I said, either he’s a fool who simply cannot understand that not everybody sitting around the world looks at things the way an ACLU lawyer does sitting in Hyde Park, Chicago. But if he’s making that mistake, then he’s actually incapable of the so-called empathy that he prizes as one of his key qualities.

HH: The backdrop to the speech today, Mark Steyn, bad timing for the President, of course, the arrest of four would-be bombers of synagogues and shooter-down of airlines and airplanes in New York. And I don’t believe they converted to radical Islam in prison because of waterboarding being conducted on the jihadists.

MS: No, they didn’t, and in fact if he wanted to make a serious speech, he would have addressed the issue of Islamic recruitment and conversion in American and other Western prisons, which is really the same thing happened to Richard Reid, the shoe bomber. It’s actually by now a tried and tested formula for recruits. It’s a far more effective formula than running around the Middle East saying oh, have you seen, you know, the Americans are waterboarding some of us. This is actually an effective recruiting tool, what they’re doing in Western prisons. It’s sad to see someone with such a September 10th mentality trotting out these old lines.

This was an extremely close eight-way tie with The Beach Boys’ Little Saint Nick, John Lennon’s Happy Christmas, Paul McCartney’s Wonderful Christmas Time, Joe Beal & Jim Boothe’s Jingle Bell Rock, Johnny Marks’ Rockin Around the Christmas Tree, the Jackson Fives’ version of I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Clause, and Wham’s Last Christmas (notably, the creepy way they sing: “someone speeeeecccccial…”).

What bothers me about Grown-Up Christmas List is just how Un-Grown-Up the song really is. Early in the song the lyrics mention “I wrote to you with childhood fantasies,” referring to when the singer was a child writing to Santa. The song goes on to describe what are supposed to be “grown-up” Christmas wishes, which turn out to be monumentally trite, idealistic, and even more fantastic than what you would imagine a child wishing.

I was at the mall two days before Christmas, and it was strangely quiet. So quiet that, sadly, I was able to hear every word of Kelly Clarkson bellowing over the sound system “My Grown-Up Christmas List.” Don’t get me wrong — I love seasonal songs. “Winter Wonderland” — I dig it. “Rudolph” — man, he’s cool, albeit not as literally as Frosty. But “Grown-Up Christmas List” is one of those overwrought ballads of melismatic bombast made for the American Idol crowd. It’s all about how the singer now eschews asking Santa for materialist goodies — beribboned trinkets and gaudy novelties — in favor of selfless grown-up stuff like world peace.

Which is an odd sentiment to hear at a shopping mall.

[…]

…To return to Kelly Clarkson — and Barbra Streisand and Michael Buble and Amy Grant — the striking thing about their “Grown-Up Christmas List” is how childish it is. The concerned vocalist tells Santa that what she wants for Christmas is:

“No more lives torn apart,
That wars would never start…”

Whether wars start depends on the intended target’s ability to deter. As to “lives torn apart,” that, too, is a matter of being on the receiving end. If you’re in an African dictatorship, your life can be torn apart. If you’re in a society that values individual liberty, you’ll at least get a shot at tearing your own life apart — you’ll make bad choices, marry a ne’er-do-well, blow your savings, lose your job — but these are ultimately within your power to correct. The passivity of the lyric — the “lives” that get “torn apart” is very revealing. A state in which lives aren’t torn apart will be, by definition, totalitarian: As in The Stepford Wives or The Invasion Of the Body Snatchers, we’ll all be wandering around in glassy-eyed conformity. “Lives” will no longer be “torn apart” because they’re no longer lives, but simply the husks of a centrally controlled tyranny. To live is messy but liberating: Free societies enable the citizenry to fulfill their potential — to innovate, to create, to accumulate — while recognizing that some of their number will fail. But to attempt to insulate free peoples from moral hazard is debilitating and ultimately fatal. To Martin Wolf’s list of a Europe “too inert, too complacent, too weak,” we might add “too old”: Healthy societies recharge their batteries by the aged and wealthy lending their savings to the young and eager. But Germany is a population of prosperous seniors with no grandchildren to lend to. Japan is a society of great invention with insufficient youth to provide a domestic market. That’s why if you’re Sony or Ikea or any other great global brand, you want access to America for your product. That’s why economic recovery will be driven by the U.S., and not by Euro-Japanese entities long marinated in Obamanomics.

One final thought on “My Grown-Up Christmas List.” The first two lines always give me a chuckle:

“Do you remember me?
I sat upon your knee…”

When was the last time you saw a child sit upon a Santa’s knee? Rod Liddle in the British Spectator reports that at a top London department store Santa sits at one end of the bench while a large “X” directs the moppet to a place down the other end, well out of arm’s reach. For even Santa Claus is just another pedophile in waiting. Naughty or nice? Who really knows? Best not to take any chances. That’s another way societies seize up — by obsessing on phantom threats rather than real ones.

Are free peoples now merely vulnerable infants in need of protection from the pedophile Santa of global capitalism? This is the issue that will determine the future: Euro-style state-directed protectionist sclerosis vs. individual liberty in all its messiness. I know what I want on my “Grown-Up Christmas List.”

So let me see if I follow the latest version of spreading the wealth: Joe the Plumber gets taxed to give money to people who don’t pay federal taxes so they can get on iTunes and pay royalties to Bruce Springsteen so he’ll have more time and money to donate to getting Obama re-elected to tax Joe the Plumber even more…

Turks pinged me this shocking – though, not-really-shocking story about the farce of airline security called The Things He Carried:

Airport security in America is a sham—“security theater” designed to make travelers feel better and catch stupid terrorists. Smart ones can get through security with fake boarding passes and all manner of prohibited items—as our correspondent did with ease.

It’s not a left/right thing, but something broader that speaks very poorly for our culture. The airline cabin is the most advanced model of the modern social-democratic state, the rarefied version of trends that, on the ground, progress more slowly. There is no smoking. There is 100% gun control. You are obliged by law to do everything the cabin crew tell you to do. If the stewardess is rude to you, tough. If you’re rude to her, there’ll be officers waiting to arrest you when you land. The justification for all this is a familiar one — that in return for surrendering individual liberties, we’ll all be collectively better off. That was the deal: Do as you’re told, and the FAA will look after you.

On Tuesday morning, they failed spectacularly to honour their end of the bargain — as I’m sure the terrorists knew they would. By all accounts, they travelled widely during the long preparations for their mission, and they must have seen that an airline cabin is the one place where, thanks to the FAA, you can virtually guarantee you’ll meet no resistance. Indeed, in their FAA-mandated coerciveness the average coach-class cabin is the nearest the Western world gets to the condition of those terrorists’ home states. We’ve all experienced those bad weather delays where you’re stuck on the runway behind 60 other planes waiting to take off and some guy says, “Hey, we’ve been in here a couple of hours now. Any chance of a Diet Coke?”, and the stewardess says he’ll have to wait, and the guy’s cranky enough to start complaining. And one part of you thinks, “Yeah, I’m pretty thirsty, too”, but the rest of you, the experienced traveller, goes, c’mon, sit down, pal, quit whining, don’t make a fuss, they’ll only delay us even more.

And so, on those Boston flights, everyone followed FAA guidelines: the cabin crew, the pilots, the passengers. There were four or five fellows with knives or box-cutters, outnumbered more than ten to one.If they’d tried to hold up that many people in a parking lot, they’d have been beaten to a pulp. But up in the air everyone swallowed the FAA’s assurance: Go along with them, be co-operative, the Feds know how to handle these things. I’m sure there were men and women in those seats thinking, well, there’s not very many of them and they don’t have any real weapons, maybe if some of us were to … But by the time they realized they were beyond the protection of the FAA it was too late.

[…]

…we do know a lot of what happened on that fourth plane, United Airlines Flight 93. Thomas Burnett, Jeremy Glick, Mark Bingham and perhaps others phoned their families to tell them they loved them and to say goodbye. Then they rushed the hijackers. The plane crashed in a field in Pennsylvania, not at Camp David or the White House. Jeremy Glick knew he would never see his three-month-old daughter again, but he also understood that he could play a small part in preserving a world for her to grow up in. By being willing to sacrifice themselves, Mr. Glick and his comrades saved thousands, perhaps including even the Vice-President and other senior officials. They took, in a word, responsibility.

Could you or I do that? This will be a long, messy, bloody war, in which civilians — salesmen, waitresses, accountants, Canadian tourists — are in the front line. America will need more Jeremy Glicks, and not just in the air. What Dave Kopel, in a brilliant column for National Review, calls the “culture of passivity” is spread very wide throughout the West – the belief that government knows best and that citizens have sub-contracted out their responsibilities to protect and defend their liberty. The question of whether America and its allies have the will to wage this war depends, in large part, on our ability to resist that “culture of passivity.”

We know now that the government wasn’t up there over upstate New York when Flight 11 doglegged and began homing in on Manhattan. We know, too, that when you’re facing terrorists willing to kill and die that the decisive moments are the first — the few minutes before they’ve established control or killed their first stewardess. So the next time it happens, we can follow FAA guidelines — or we can say screw ‘em and their worthless assurances, and rush forward to overpower the fanatics, even if the FAA has seen to it we’ve nothing to charge them with except the rubber chicken.

If you want a name for it, try the “Minutemen” — the men of the Revolutionary War who were pledged to take the field at a minute’s notice. In this new war, we are all called upon to be Minutemen.

The heroism of the passengers of Flight 93 deserves America’s highest honours. And, instead of indulging in gestures like confiscating plastic knives, the government should summon up the will to match their courage.

Across the electric wires, the hum is ceaseless: Give it up, loser. Don’t go down with the ship when it’s swept away by the Obama tsunami. According to newspaper reports, polls show that most people believe newspaper reports claiming that most people believe polls showing that most people have read newspaper reports agreeing that polls show he’s going to win.

In the words of Publishers’ Clearing House, he may already have won! The battleground states have all turned blue, the reddest of red states are rapidly purpling. Don’t you know, little fool? You never can win. Use your mentality, wake up to reality. Why be the last right-wing pundit to sign up with Small-Government Conservatives For The Liberal Supermajority? We still need pages for the coronation, and there’s a pair of velvet knickerbockers with your name on it.

Yes, technically, this is still a two-party state, but one of the parties is like Elton John’s post-Oscar bash and the other is a church social in Wasilla. As David Sedaris put it in The New Yorker:

“I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. ‘Can I interest you in the chicken?’ she asks. ‘Or would you prefer the platter of s–t with bits of broken glass in it?’

“To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.”

Well, to be honest, I’ve never much cared for chicken.

McCain vs. Obama is not the choice many of us would have liked in an ideal world. But then it’s not an “ideal world,” and the belief that it can be made so is one of the things that separates those who think Obama will “heal the planet” and those of us who support McCainfaute de mieux. I agree with Thomas Sowell that an Obama-Pelosi supermajority will mark what he calls “a point of no return.”

It would not be, as some naysayers scoff, “Jimmy Carter’s second term,” but something far more transformative. The new president would front the fourth great wave of liberal annexation – the first being FDR’s New Deal, the second LBJ’s Great Society, and the third the incremental but remorseless cultural advance when Reagan conservatives began winning victories at the ballot box and liberals turned their attention to the other levers of the society, from grade school up. The terrorist educator William Ayers, Obama’s patron in Chicago, is an exemplar of that most-recent model: 40 years ago, he was in favor of blowing up public buildings; then he figured out it was easier to get inside and undermine them from within.

All three liberal waves have transformed American expectations of the state. The spirit of the age is: Ask not what your country can do for you, demand it. Why can’t the government sort out my health care? Why can’t they pick up my mortgage?

In his first inaugural address, Calvin Coolidge said: “I favor the policy of economy, not because I wish to save money, but because I wish to save people.” That’s true in a more profound sense than he could have foreseen. In Europe, lavish social-democratic government has transformed citizens into eternal wards of the Nanny State: the bureaucracy’s assumption of every adult responsibility has severed Continentals from the most basic survival impulse, to the point where unaffordable entitlements on shriveled birth rates have put a question mark over some of the oldest nation states on Earth. A vote for an Obama-Pelosi-Barney Frank-ACORN supermajority is a vote for a Europeanized domestic policy that is, as the eco-types like to say, “unsustainable.”

[…]

“People of the world,” Sen. Obama declared sonorously at his self-worship service in Germany, “look at Berlin, where a wall came down, a continent came together, and history proved that there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one.”

No, sorry. History proved no such thing. In the Cold War, the world did not stand as one. One half of Europe was a prison, and in the other half far too many people – the Barack Obamas of the day – were happy to go along with that division in perpetuity.

And the wall came down not because “the world stood as one,” but because a few courageous people stood against the conventional wisdom of the day. Had Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan been like Helmut Schmidt and Francois Mitterrand and Pierre Trudeau and Jimmy Carter, the Soviet empire (notwithstanding its own incompetence) would have survived, and the wall would still be standing. Sen. Obama’s feeble passivity will get you a big round of applause precisely because it’s the easy option: Do nothing but hold hands and sing the easy-listening anthems of one-worldism, and the planet will heal.

To govern is to choose. And sometimes the choices are tough ones. When has Barack Obama chosen to take a stand? When he got along to get along with the Chicago machine? When he sat for 20 years in the pews of an ugly neo-segregationist race-baiting grievance-monger? When he voted to deny the surviving “fetuses” of botched abortions medical treatment? When in his short time in national politics he racked up the most liberal – i.e., the most doctrinaire, the most orthodox, the most reflex – voting record in the Senate? Or when, on those many occasions the questions got complex and required a choice, he dodged it and voted merely “present”?

The world rarely stands as one. You can, as Reagan and Thatcher did, stand up. Or, like Obama voting “present,” you can stand down.

[…]

Thomas Sowell is right: It would be a “point of no return,” the most explicit repudiation of the animating principles of America. For a vigilant republic of limited government and self-reliant citizens, it would be a Declaration of Dependence.

If a majority of Americans want that, we holdouts must respect their choice. But, if you don’t want it, vote accordingly.